MUSIC PLAYER/SERVER/STREAMER COCKTAIL AUDIO X45

In recent years, digital music has become fragmented, and fragmented again. We began the new millennium with a CD collection. Then we started sharing music files, and then buying files, and then streaming files. High-res audio became a thing. And just to complicate things, vinyl has made a comeback.

That leaves modern hi-fi with the problem of bringing it all together. And nobody achieves this more comprehensively than Cocktail Audio.

EQUIPMENT

So the Cocktail X45 aims to be the do-it-all source. But importantly, it also aims to do so at an audiophile level of reproduction. Its outputs are available not only on the usual unbalanced RCA sockets but also from balanced XLR sockets. It uses a high-quality toroidal power transformer, with separate supplies for digital and analogue circuits. Its conversion, which works on the files coming from any direction, uses dual ESS Sabre 9018K2M chips, widely regarded as the world’s best, and capable of handling high-res PCM files in pretty much any format up to 32-bit/384kHz, as well as DSD native to DSD256, with MQA-compatibility as well, so that you can take advantage of high-res streaming from Tidal. Other streaming services are,